


Perfume

by blessedthrice



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: AU, Loss, M/M, Modern, teen!win
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-12
Updated: 2016-10-12
Packaged: 2018-08-22 03:02:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8270147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blessedthrice/pseuds/blessedthrice
Summary: Things felt smaller with her gone. Miniscule, like walls closing in and doors slamming shut. His father had said the woods would do them good. The space would encourage them to change, to move on, to grow up. Erwin frowns, soft blonde hair spilling across his pillow like white thread. All this room to grow and all he wants to do is curl in, to shrivel up, to disappear.





	

**Author's Note:**

> My contribution for Erwin Week 2016, Childhood! Hope you all enjoy. Warnings for loss of a parent, grief, teen angst, etc.

The largeness of the room threatens to swallow him whole. Lying on his side in bed, he can see the outline of familiar shapes in the dark--a sleek, white desk, a large computer, long black curtains over two equally long windows. A minimalist chair. Two overstuffed bookshelves. There is a closet on the far wall, a small room in its own right. The white doors are slightly ajar, a mound of dirty laundry spilling out from within. 

The windows are open, and he can smell rain, hear it even, tapping against the glass. The earth smells different here, he thinks. Deeper, older. Less complicated. He can smell the woods beyond the house, the maple and elm and pine with their leaves that change from green to gold and red. He wonders what it will look like in the winter, when all the leaves have gone and only the long tangled branches remain, clasping at one another like lover’s hands. He wonders if he will be able to see the horizon through them--the sun setting behind the mountains far in the west, its rays reaching out towards him like warm arms. He wonders if the sky will turn a thousand splendid colors, splintered into shards like light off the surface of a diamond. 

He lights a cigarette, rolls onto his back. 

The ceiling seems to drift away, even as he remains still on the flimsy IKEA mattress that his father managed to drag up the stairs while he was at school. Could it be growing? Floating upwards? Lifting away? 

_This will be a new beginning for us, Erwin, I swear._

He thinks about the brownstone in the city, with its steep stairways and small closets and narrow rooms. He thinks about his body pressed into stranger’s bodies on the train, the cats in bodegas who wrapped like twine around his ankles. He thinks about his mother, holding him tightly to her chest as they slipped into a crowd, her hand cupped over the back of his skull. 

_It’s like with fish. Bigger the tank, bigger the fish._

Things felt smaller with her gone. Miniscule, like walls closing in and doors slamming shut. His father had said the woods would do them good. The space would encourage them to change, to move on, to grow up. Erwin frowns, soft blonde hair spilling across his pillow like white thread. 

All this room to grow and all he wants to do is curl in, to shrivel up, to disappear. 

\--

At school the classrooms seem empty. Twenty vacant desks to ten filled ones. He wonders why people stay, why they don’t move to the cities and let nature take back what belongs to it. What is the point in passing through the world like a ghost, so far removed from other people that you hardly know what’s real? That morning he’d heard an old song on the new hits radio station. He wonders if they ever play the songs he knows intimately, the ones that blare out of open car windows and through the swinging doors of clubs you have to know someone to get into. He wonders if he’ll ever hear those songs again, or if they’ll fade away like the fall, like the sun in the west, like the smoke from a cigarette. 

\--

“Can I sit here?”

He is surprised, so he doesn’t answer. The boy is small and pale, fingernails picked so clean that he can see the skin underneath. He has black hair, inky and soft. It falls in waves over his forehead, the rest of it shaved to the scalp. He has very full lips, like two petals blooming from the stem of his sharp chin. 

“Yeah, sure. Of course.”

When he sits down, his hair falls over one eye, and the smell of it wafts across the table. He smells uncomplicated, like smoke and leaves and something fresh. Laundry detergent. 

“What are you drawing?”

He looks down at the table, to the notebook between his hands. He’s sketched something crude there, a scribble of a skyline etched like a tattoo in his mind. He pushes it towards the boy, an offering. 

“Home,” he says, and the boy looks at him for a long time.

\--

There is a box in the front room that neither of them will touch. He and his father have adapted their lives around it, have grown so used to it being there that he hardly notices it anymore. 

It is three in the afternoon, and he is crawling on the floor, looking for the dropped back of an earring he’s been wearing since middle school. His shoulder snags the corner of the box, and he sits back on his heels, looking at it properly for the first time in months. He knows what they’ve packed in there, of course. He knows why they don’t unpack it now, and knows that he won’t do it even if it feels irrational. Still, it seems important, all of a sudden, to at least look in inside.

He crawls forward, kneeling in front of it like an alter.

Inside, things are just as he expected. He runs his fingers over a silk scarf, wound up tenderly and placed neatly on top. When he pulls them away, they smell like perfume. He closes the box, and goes upstairs to wash his hands. 

\--

The boy is called Levi.

Levi is allergic to peanut butter and doesn’t like to be talked to. He talks a lot to Erwin, though. Mostly about books he reads, or things he sees on the internet. At times it seems that all he does anymore is sit and listen to Levi talk, busy fingers working at something on a blank piece of paper. A memory, perhaps, or a want. It always becomes a blur before the end. 

Erwin doesn’t mind when Levi talks. In fact, he has started to feel as though he needs it. It makes him feel special, unique. Relevant. When Levi talks, he leans closer, their cheeks nearly brushing as Levi mumbles against his ear. He doesn’t always follow, doesn’t always have to.

It’s enough just to feel the vibrations against his skin. To be told a secret.

\--

When winter comes, he cannot see the mountains. He is walking past his window one afternoon and sees only the tangles of trees, thick silver arms twisting up towards the sky. He feels strangely relieved. 

\--

“What’s in there?”

Erwin looks up, following the direction of Levi’s eyes. They are in his living room, curled side by side under a soft blanket. At first, he doesn’t see what Levi means. His eyes scan the large room, finding nothing but familiar shapes. Large, leather sofa. Broad oak table. Wide brick fireplace. There is a circular rug in the center, a simple design. There is a pile of magazines on the side table, old copies of Outdoor Life that his father won’t throw away. 

When he sees it, his fists clench.

“Nothing, just some old shit we haven’t put away.”

Levi looks at him, gray eyes searching his for something. It makes him uncomfortable, and he looks away, folding his arms across his chest. He feels defensive, though he isn’t sure it’s rational.

“It’s always there. Since we met.”

Erwin frowns, padding in his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He pulls one out, lighting it. The silver smoke fills up the space between them, makes the room feel smaller. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Erwin says. 

“You never want to talk,” Levi replies.

“How could I get a word in edgewise?”

It comes off harsher than he means it, and he worries that Levi will leave. He looks up, face tight with anxiety. He needs Levi to stay, to talk. If Levi goes the world will expand. If Levi goes he’ll drift away, like a ship without an anchor. Like he’s made of nothing but air. 

Levi’s eyes are soft when he catches them. It startles him, how much he sees there. Gentleness swims in those gray eyes like fish, kept small by the size of his irises. He wonders how big it would be if it could escape, if his eyes were the size of the sun, or the moon, or even a fist. 

His fingers touch Erwin’s cheek, smoothing a line beneath the bone. 

When Levi kisses him, Erwin is not startled. Instead, he is heavy, so weighted down by their physical bodies that he is sure that he can hear the ceilings lowering, the room shrinking. He fits, here, against Levi. In this room. 

It’s snowing when Levi goes home that night. Erwin watches it fall out the window, kneeling in front of the open box. He holds the scarf in his hands, tight. 

\--

It’s cold out, but Erwin walks to school. The sky is white, so thick that he can hardly tell where it ends, where the earth begins. He feels small, comfortable. His hair is growing longer, white threads along his pale cheeks. He’s nearly as tall as his father, now, has to wear socks under his jeans to hide his peeping ankles. 

As he walks, he listens to an old song, one he knows the words to. One he knows the feeling of. 

\--

“Can I see it?”

Levi is perched like a cat on his knee, curled around his body like twine. Erwin looks up, smiling his crooked smile. The one that is like his mother’s. 

The page is full. There is the city there, it’s skyline crisp against a blue sky. In the center, a woman in a silk scarf looks back over her shoulder, bag hanging off her shoulder. He can nearly smell her perfume.

“She was really beautiful, Erwin.”

“Yeah, she was.”

Levi’s arms close around him protectively, a hand cupping the back of his skull. 

\--

In the spring, he carries the box up the stairs. He takes out the things that are practical--the photos, the pieces of art, the journals. He puts those things away, in places where he can get to them. He hangs some of the photos in the living room, some paintings in the hallway. He leaves her clothes, folding them neatly and storing them in the back of the coat closet. 

The scarf he keeps. He folds it into thirds and tucks it beneath his pillow.

\--

When he wakes up, her perfume is everywhere. 

He slips out of bed, smooth as a fish in cold water. He dresses slowly, eyes fixed on the woods outside the window. The trees are budding. Their leaves will blossom soon, he thinks, green and uncomplicated. Infinite. 

As he stoops to catch his reflection in his mirror, he wonders when his room got to be so small. He wonders at how much he’s grown. 

Outside, Levi is waiting on the porch. His mouth is full of words, the kind that Erwin bends to hear. 

The silver smoke from his cigarette disappears from between his fingers, drifting up into the endless blue sky.


End file.
